ABSTRACT Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate--commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom--have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. Perversely, incarceration has its most corrosive effects on families whose fathers were involved in neither domestic violence nor violent crime before being imprisoned. Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality--and may even lead to more crime in the long-term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom. U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. Wildeman and Western advocate several policy reforms, such as limiting prison time for drug offenders and for parolees who violate the technical conditions of their parole, reconsidering sentence enhancements for repeat offenders, and expanding supports for prisoners and ex-prisoners. But Wildeman and Western argue that criminal justice reform alone will not solve the problems of school failure, joblessness, untreated addiction, and mental illness that pave the way to prison. In fact, focusing solely on criminal justice reforms would repeat the mistakes the nation made during the prison boom: trying to solve deep social problems with criminal justice policies. Addressing those broad problems, they say, requires a greater social commitment to education, public health, and the employment opportunities of low-skilled men and women. The primary sources of order and stability--public safety in its wide sense--are the informal social controls of family and work. Thus, broad social policies hold the promise not only of improving the wellbeing of fragile families, but also, by strengthening families and providing jobs, of contributing to public safety.

[Show abstract][Hide abstract]ABSTRACT:
Using data collected from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this study investigated the links between intimate partners’ relationship dynamics and criminal offending in “fragile families.” We assessed the mechanisms underlying relationships among parents with young children from the perspective of three dominant theories in the field of criminology (i.e., strain, social control/bonding, and social learning theories), as well as the potential moderating effects of gender. In this study, criminal offending is operationalized as whether the respondents have been formally “booked or charged with breaking a law” since the last data collection period. Overall, our study lends some support for all three theories, but we found little evidence that the relationships among our substantive predictor variables and formal contact with the criminal justice system differed by gender.

[Show abstract][Hide abstract]ABSTRACT:
There were nearly 12 million admissions to U.S. jails in 2011, the majority of them Black or Hispanic. We analyzed data on men's health screenings from the last Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Inmates in Local Jails. Black and Hispanic men had the same or higher odds of reporting nearly all types of screenings compared to White male inmates. Because many prisoners are medically underserved, jails can be crucial public health partners in reducing disparities by identifying men in need of health care. The anticipated expansion of Medicaid eligibility in 2014 constitutes an important opportunity for correctional and public health authorities to work together to ensure linkage to care following release from incarceration.

International Journal of Men s Health 09/2013; 12(3):213-227. DOI:10.3149/jmh.1203.213

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Incarceration in Fragile FamiliesVOL. 20 / NO. 2 / FALL 2010 157Incarceration in Fragile FamiliesChristopher Wildeman and Bruce WesternSummarySince the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate —commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom—have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling.Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces famil-ial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. Perversely, incarceration has its most corrosive effects on families whose fathers were involved in neither domestic violence nor violent crime before being imprisoned. Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality—and may even lead to more crime in the long term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom.U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. Wildeman and Western advocate several policy reforms, such as limiting prison time for drug offenders and for parolees who violate the techni-cal conditions of their parole, reconsidering sentence enhancements for repeat offenders, and expanding supports for prisoners and ex-prisoners. But Wildeman and Western argue that criminal justice reform alone will not solve the problems of school failure, joblessness, untreated addiction, and mental illness that pave the way to prison. In fact, focusing solely on criminal justice reforms would repeat the mistakes the nation made during the prison boom: trying to solve deep social problems with criminal justice policies. Addressing those broad problems, they say, requires a greater social commitment to education, public health, and the employment opportunities of low-skilled men and women. The primary sources of order and stability—public safety in its wide sense—are the informal social controls of family and work. Thus, broad social policies hold the promise not only of improving the well-being of fragile families, but also, by strengthening families and providing jobs, of contributing to public safety.www.futureofchildren.orgChristopher Wildeman is an assistant professor of sociology and faculty affiliate of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University. Bruce Western is a professor of sociology and director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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158 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN Christopher Wildeman and Bruce WesternOhas become commonplace for young men living in poor and minority communities, and life in fragile families has been significantly altered. As incarceration rates have soared, poor women and children have been left to deal with the separation, visitation, and return of their progeny, partners, and parents. A burgeoning research literature shows that incarceration, on average, impairs health and diminishes the earnings of adult men, many of whom are fathers. Incarceration also elevates the risk of divorce and separation, diminishes the financial resources and well-being of wives and girlfriends left behind, and is linked to increases in children’s aggression, behav-ioral problems, and social marginalization. By further reducing the well-being of fragile families, mass imprisonment lays the ground-work for a vicious cycle in which the criminal justice system does not diminish—and may even increase—addiction, abuse, and crime.ver the past thirty-five years, the U.S. incarceration rate has risen fivefold, from around 100 to around 500 prisoners for every 100,000 people. In just the past decade, imprisonment We first describe the concentration of incar-ceration in, and negative effects on, fragile families and then discuss the implications of these findings and suggest some future directions for policy. Sentencing policies that would shrink the penal population while preserving public safety offer one key direc-tion for reform. But criminal justice reform will go only so far in reducing the negative effects of crime and incarceration on frag-ile families. Because many of the men who come into contact with the criminal justice system struggle with chronic unemployment, untreated addiction, poor health, and mental illness, protecting fragile families from the effects of violence and antisocial behavior will ultimately depend on social policy as much as criminal justice reform. Social policies that provide the structure and stakes in conformity known to control crime hold real promise for buffering fragile families from the nega-tive effects of both crime and incarceration. Such policies will enable the nation to begin to move away from the formal sanctions of prison and jail sentences to the informal social controls of stable work and family life.The Demography of Punishment in AmericaIn order to understand why incarceration may be so consequential for children in fragile families, we first must determine what is unique about American imprisonment. In this section, we document the novelty of American imprisonment, discuss the causes of the prison boom, and outline how common imprisonment is for adult men and parental imprisonment is for children.Most of the chapters in this volume rely primar-ily on research that uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Because most of the research they review uses these unique data, the authors of these chapters can use the term “fragile families” in the strict sense—families in which the parents were unmarried when the child was born. For better or for worse, much of the research we rely on did not use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. But, as we show, most of the families who experience incarceration were probably unmarried—and almost certainly were vulnerable in other ways—at the time of the child’s birth. Thus, we use the term “fragile families” in this chapter to describe families who experience incarceration, even though not all of the families we consider were “fragile families” in the strict sense.

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VOL. 20 / NO. 2 / FALL 2010 159Incarceration in Fragile FamiliesMass Imprisonment in Comparative-Historical PerspectiveFor most of the twentieth century, research-ers studying U.S. child well-being were unlikely to see prisons as a source of social inequality. As late as the mid-1970s, only 100 out of every 100,000 Americans were incar-cerated in a state or federal prison; only 2 per-cent of the population went to prison at any point in their lives.1 The nation’s penal system would have seemed unlikely to weigh heav-ily on citizens’ life chances, not just because the incarceration rate was low in an absolute sense, but also because of its historic stability. For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the American imprisonment rate per 100,000 rarely exceeded 125 or fell below 75.2 Today the U.S. incarceration rate is about seven times higher than the West European average and is approached only by rates in the penal systems of some former Soviet republics and South Africa.3 This is a dras-tic change from the early 1970s, when the American incarceration rate was only about twice the rate of most other wealthy democ-racies. Although the U.S. rate has been rising more slowly in recent years, it has continued to climb even through a recession that has caused deep cuts in state budgets. The American incarceration rate has been much higher than that of other long-standing democracies since at least the late 1980s, but American men have been at extremely high lifetime risk of imprisonment begin-ning only in the past decade, further setting the American penal system apart from those of other democracies. As of the early 2000s, 6.6 percent of Americans, and more than 11 percent of American men, could expect to go to prison at some point.4 These figures show that mass imprisonment5 is historically novel within America and that imprisonment is now a common experience for adult men. The Causes of Mass ImprisonmentWhat caused the U.S. imprisonment rate to increase so sharply? Rising crime would seem an obvious suspect. But because crime rates have risen and fallen significantly since the mid-1970s while the imprisonment rate has been climbing without interruption, the year-to-year fluctuations in crime are unlikely to have directly produced the steady decades-long increase in the imprisonment rate. Though a variety of explanations have been proposed, researchers agree on two main causes for rising imprisonment: changes in the economic and social life of urban men with little schooling, and a punitive turn in criminal justice policy. It is helpful to think of the first as providing the raw material for the prison boom and the second as transforming this raw material into a greatly enlarged penal population.Before the late 1960s, urban manufacturing industries helped guarantee the livelihoods of low-skilled men in American cities. Unemployment rates of these men were relatively high compared with those of men with more schooling, but most prime-age men with only a high school education were working at wages that could support a family. Their jobs provided stakes in conformity6 not only through their stability, but also through the family ties that a steady paycheck helped support. Urban manufacturing thus provided not just a decent standard of living, but also a daily routine and an attachment to main-stream social institutions. In this setting, deindustrialization was catastrophic. Wide-spread joblessness in poor urban neighbor-hoods coupled with the emergence of a gray economy and a booming drug trade to foster addiction and careers in crime, leaving young men in inner cities vulnerable to arrest and prosecution.7

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160 THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN Christopher Wildeman and Bruce WesternAt this point, changes in the criminal justice system became important. As late as the mid-1970s, many arrests—most significantly, for public order and drug offenses—would have drawn no more than a small fine or a short spell of community supervision. From the mid-1970s, a punitive shift in criminal justice policy turned imprisonment into the primary penalty for a felony conviction. Tougher drug sentences, together with limits on parole and sentence enhancements for repeat and violent offenders, increased prison admission rates and time served in prison.8 Policing also intensified, and drug arrest rates, particularly among African Americans, increased sharply through the 1980s. In this way, the combina-tion of a declining labor market for low-skill men and a punitive shift in criminal justice policies produced a sharp increase in incar-ceration rates.Disparities in the Cumulative Risk of (Parental) ImprisonmentWere imprisonment evenly distributed throughout the population, it would be of no greater consequence for fragile families than for any other demographic group. But large racial and class disparities in imprisonment have produced extremely high lifetime risks of imprisonment for minority men with little schooling, and small but rapidly growing risks of imprisonment for similar women. Because these men and women are unlikely to marry but no less likely than those outside of prison to have children, they are likely to form frag-ile families.Table 1 shows changes in the risk of impris-onment by age thirty to thirty-four for cohorts of men born between 1945–49 and 1975–79.9 The risk nearly tripled for white men and more than doubled for African American men. Although both groups expe-rienced large relative increases in the risk of imprisonment, the absolute change in this risk was much larger for African American men. In the youngest cohort, born between 1975 and 1979, around one in five African American men experienced imprisonment; for comparable white men, the risk was around one in thirty. When risks are further broken down by level of education within racial groups, differences Table 1. Cumulative Risk of Imprisonment by Age 30–34 for Men Born between 1945–49 and 1975–79, by Race and EducationSource: Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621, no. 1 (2009): 231. Birth cohort1960–64Percent1945–491950–54 1955–59 1965–691970–74 1975–79White menHigh school dropoutsHigh school onlyAll noncollegeSome collegeAll men 4.2 0.7 1.8 0.7 1.2 7.2 2.0 2.9 0.7 1.9 8.0 2.1 3.2 0.6 2.0 8.0 2.5 3.7 0.8 2.210.5 4.0 5.1 0.7 2.814.8 3.8 5.1 0.9 2.815.3 4.1 6.3 1.2 3.3African American menHigh school dropoutsHigh school onlyAll noncollegeSome collegeAll men14.710.212.1 4.9 9.019.611.314.1 3.510.627.6 9.414.7 4.311.541.612.419.9 5.515.257.016.826.7 6.820.362.520.330.9 8.522.869.018.035.7 7.620.7

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VOL. 20 / NO. 2 / FALL 2010 161Incarceration in Fragile Familiesin the risk of imprisonment become even more pronounced. Most notably, African American men in recent cohorts who did not complete some college had around a one in three chance of going to prison at some point, while African American men in the same cohort who dropped out of high school had a two in three chance of being incarcerated. Imprisonment among white men is sig-nificantly lower. Even for the most marginal group of white men—those who did not com-plete high school—only 15.3 percent went to prison. Thus the consequences of mass imprisonment are concentrated among those already most on the periphery of society—African American and (to a lesser degree) white men with little schooling—the same segments of society in which fragile families are most likely to be formed.Incarceration and single parenthood, con-centrated among minority men and women with little schooling, combined to produce high rates of imprisonment among fathers in disadvantaged families. The combination of incarceration and single parenthood is reflected in marriage rates of men in prison. While about 25 percent of African American men aged twenty-two to thirty who are not incarcerated are married, the marriage rate is only 11 percent among incarcerated men (figure 1). Surveys of men in prison find that though they are less likely to be married than men who are not in prison, they are just as likely to have children. As a result, African American children growing up in fragile families are likely to have fathers who have been incarcerated at some point.While children growing up in fragile families are likely to have a father who has been incar-cerated, how likely is it that children overall will have a parent, either a father or a mother, who is imprisoned during their childhood? Table 2 reports estimates of a child’s risk of paternal and maternal imprisonment by age fourteen. The table compares two cohorts, one born in 1978 and reaching age fourteen in 1992, at the beginning of the era of mass incarceration, and a younger cohort born in 1990 and reaching age fourteen in 2004, at Figure 1. Percentage of Men Aged 22–30 Who Were Married in 2000 and Men Aged 33–40 Who Were Fathers in 1997–98Source: Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage, 2006), p. 137.020406080White Black HispanicPercent who are marriedWhiteHispanicPercent who are fathersBlack PercentageNon-incarcerated menIncarcerated men143722442511676476817370